Israel's great survivor toughs it out again

Mr Sharon at the Women International Zionist Organisation conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday.
Picture: AFP

His 50-year career has zig-zagged between heroic and controversial. Can Ariel Sharon shrug off another scandal, asks Ed O'Loughlin from Jerusalem.

It has been another one of those months for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. On Wednesday one of his old friends was charged with bribing him; last week his son Gilad was ruled in contempt of court for shielding him; the opposition wants his resignation and his loyal party colleagues are circling like sharks.

Worse, polls suggest that while the Israeli public still likes Mr Sharon it no longer much believes in him. And in the weeks ahead he could himself be charged in relation to this week's $US700,000 ($A900,750) bribery scandal, or over a second, separate, scandal involving secret foreign donations exceeding $1.5 million.

The received wisdom in Israel is that if such charges are pressed, Mr Sharon will be forced to step down until he clears his name.

Were it a question of anybody else but Ariel Sharon you wouldn't get a bet at any odds on him still being around in six months. But the 76-year-old Mr Sharon has been surviving political scandals - and worse - for more than 50 years now, right back to the birth of Israel. This week his backers were telling anyone who would listen that he wasn't going anywhere.

Mr Sharon's first brush with survival was also his most profound: in 1948, as a youthful 20-year-old platoon commander in the Israeli Defence Force, he was severely wounded in inconclusive fighting at Latrun, on the approaches to Jerusalem, and had to drag himself from the battlefield. In his memoirs he claimed this experience shaped his view that the most aggressive option was usually the best.

Recovered from his wounds, he quickly built a reputation as a daring combat leader. In 1953 he was recalled from the reserves to head "Unit 101", a special forces unit whose role was to carry out reprisals for Arab attacks on Israelis.

In 1953 he gained his first notoriety, leading a raid that killed 69 Jordanian civilians in the village of Qibya. Mr Sharon was spared much of the blame for the operation because it was known to have been ordered by someone higher up the command chain.

Sharon had a grandiose plan to forge a new anti-Muslim alliance with Lebanon's Christians.

Promoted to lead a paratroop brigade, he was again at the centre of controversy in the 1956 Suez crisis, when Israel secretly conspired with Britain and France to invade Egypt.

Despite orders, Mr Sharon allowed his unit to become sucked into fighting in Sinai's Mitla Pass, losing 40 men. After the war it was alleged within the defence force that the successful assault on the pass - and its cost in lives - had been tactically unnecessary. According to some, the resulting cloud slowed Mr Sharon's meteoric rise in the defence force for several years. But in the 1967 war he was back in Sinai, where he commanded an armoured division with distinction. In the Yom Kippur war of 1973 he again commanded an armoured force in the Sinai, where he reversed Israel's earlier tactical losses by driving through a gap between two larger Egyptian forces and crossing the Suez Canal, threatening not only the rear of the Egyptian armies but also Cairo.

Once again there were complaints within the defence force that Mr Sharon had courted disaster by acting on his own initiative, disobeying orders. It is said that hostility from other senior officers led to Mr Sharon being passed over for the coveted post of chief of staff.

After the war he entered politics, co-founding the right-wing Likud Party, but lost the fight for leadership to Menachem Begin.

In 1982, as minister for defence in a Likud-led coalition, he cajoled Prime Minister Begin into authorising Operation Peace for Galilee, which he sold as a limited incursion into south Lebanon to suppress attacks on northern Israel by Palestinian Liberation Organisation forces and artillery.

Instead, Mr Sharon ordered his troops all the way to Beirut. It later emerged that he had a grandiose plan to forge a new anti-Muslim alliance with Lebanon's Christians, which would drive Palestinian guerilas and civilians from Lebanon to Jordan. He hoped they would ultimately be joined by the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza.

The plan quickly collapsed. Hundreds of Lebanese civilians died in Israel's bombardment of Beirut. In the chaos, Lebanese militiamen allied to Israel massacred up to 2000 Palestinian men, women and children in two refugee camps while nearby Israeli units failed to intervene.

The massacres caused outrage abroad and in Israel. Mr Sharon denied all knowledge of the militiamen's actions, but an Israeli inquiry found him "indirectly responsible".

He was stripped of his portfolio but allowed to remain in the cabinet. Once again, his career survived near-disgrace.

Mr Sharon, as minister for housing and a leading proponent of the belief that the entire biblical land of Israel should be under Jewish control, authorised the building of dozens of fortified settlements in the Arab lands occupied by Israel after the 1967 war.

Arabs claim that it was Mr Sharon's provocative insistence in September 2000 on marching into the Al Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount - holy to both Muslims and Jews - that sparked the present bloody intifada.

Whatever the cause of the crisis - Israel insists that PLO chairman Yasser Arafat ordered the intifada - Mr Sharon turned Israeli anger to his advantage. The following year he was elected Prime Minister, completing his long political comeback from the stain of Beirut.

A year on, faith in Mr Sharon is flagging, with the peace process stalled and the economy depressed. But he still has two big things going for him: his main rivals, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Labor Opposition Leader Shimon Peres. Both are failed former prime ministers.

Ordinary Israelis may yet decide there are enough reasons to say goodbye at last to "Arik", but hope of finding someone newer and better will not be among them.